Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : KIT Demonstrates Technologies for Circular Economy at Pilot Scale

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

Carbon Cycle Lab: From Waste to Industrial Raw Materials

With rising energy costs, dwindling resources, and growing volumes of trash, humanity has a waste problem. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have created a new development platform for a more sustainable circular economy: the Carbon Cycle Lab (CCLab). Their research includes a project for chemical recycling of plastic waste, which is being shifted to pilot scale. The project’s aim is to include previously non-recyclable waste in material cycles.

Global plastic production has increased significantly over the past 70 years, reaching about 414 million tonnes in 2023. However, the recycling rate is only 10 percent. Since energy costs are expected to continue rising while resources become scarcer, industrial transformation must include higher recycling rates. KIT is contributing to efforts to achieve higher rates with its new research platform, the Carbon Cycle Lab (CCLab). With their bioliq® project, KIT researchers had already developed a complete recycling process for biological residues. The CCLab now extends their work to the chemical recycling of plastic waste. “For a carbon-neutral circular economy, we need to return waste from industry, households, agriculture, and forestry to our material cycles, and we need to use renewable energy to do so,” said Professor Dieter Stapf, who heads KIT’s Institute for Technical Chemistry. A closed carbon cycle is better for the environment and conserves scarce resources, according to Stapf. “In our country, energy and resources are scarce and expensive,” he added. “In the future, our waste will be a raw material. Recycling it is efficient and economical and will help us reduce our dependency on fossil fuel imports, which has become especially urgent with the crisis in Ukraine.

The Carbon Cycle Lab Benefits from bioliq® Insights

KIT is already conducting extensive research on the use of biogenic residues and renewable resources to produce sustainable chemicals and fuels. In the bioliq® project, which was completed late last year, KIT scientists and their partners set up the first pilot plant capable of producing tonnes of gasoline from straw. “Much of what we have learned from bioliq® is going into CCLab,” said Professor Frederik Scheiff, head of the Fuel Technology Division at KIT’s Engler-Bunte Institute. “In the last operating campaign, we demonstrated a potential way forward by converting plastic pyrolysis oils to chemical raw materials for the first time. That was something nobody else had really done yet,” Scheiff said. “We’ve learned how to develop and scale such technologies, and we’ve showed that they can also be used to convert complex and previously non-recyclable plastic waste into chemical raw materials.

source : Karlsruhe Institute of Technology